


what do you think, darling (have we lived too much too fast?)

by Ibbyliv



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Also there's a lot of cherry blossoms, Angst, Combeferre is experiencing a human emotion, Courfeyrac's life is a Mika song, Dublin - Freeform, Everyone is with everyone - Freeform, Existential Crisis, F/M, Fluff, Jehan's life is a Shakira one, London, M/M, Multi, No one has their shit together, Non-Binary Jean Prouvaire, Non-Binary Montparnasse, Other, Paris - Freeform, Polyamorous Character, Polyamory, Smut, Sorry if this is not your thing
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-05-07
Updated: 2015-05-07
Packaged: 2018-03-29 11:41:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3895030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ibbyliv/pseuds/Ibbyliv
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If you're Courfeyrac your life is cool because you have a crush on pretty much all of your friends and they all crush back on you and you’re going to have a huge orgy with chocolate fountains and glitter and Netflix later tonight. Right?</p><p>
  <em>Wrong.</em>
</p><p>If you’re Courfeyrac decisions are hard and life is hard and you’re horny and drunk and want to jump half the club but at the same time you want to form deep emotional bonds and be so in love that your intestines feel like that friggen 90s candy that fizzled on your tongue, and you want to get married and have twelve puppies and at the same time you want to paint your body lime green and dance to Mika for precisely eleven years and then cuddle with people and eat cereal from the box together, so many people, and explode with affection, and Jean Prouvaire should write Shakesperean sonnets about you but at the same time zie should decide zie’s madly in love with you and Combeferre should treat your case but at the same time he should decide he wants to spend the rest of his life with you.</p><p>So yeah.</p><p>Lesbian mothers wisdom. Scientifically proven. You’re fucked.</p>
            </blockquote>





	what do you think, darling (have we lived too much too fast?)

**Author's Note:**

> As you can see, I'm back. I'm procrastinating, I've left two WIPs unfinished (actually three but you don't know about the third one yet) and I promise to finish them at some point but I'm emotional and tired because I returned from England a couple of weeks ago and I'm still trying to get my shit together here, study for exams and not let everything and everyone piss me off. This story is a fucking train wreck. It's a really personal, self imposed effort to write polyamory and the anxieties a polyamorous person may have handle. Many things may be inaccurate or disrespectful and I apologize in advance for that, if I do something out of ignorance PLEASE call me out on it. I'm sorry about all the couples and all the sex and all the random scenes popping out of nowhere, I am aware of the fact that this looks pretty much like a mediocre soap opera, I don't know why I needed to write it but I did. I also wanted to write Ferre losing his shit. Because I've lost my shit, and people lose their shit. I made an effort, I probably failed. Sorry, Ferre.  
> This fic is also full of whiny existential crisis and people not really knowing what they want. That's self imposed. All of it. People scared by time and people scared by places and people scared of leaving and of having to go back? Yep, that's all me. There are different places in this fic, because right now I'm dealing with calling home everywhere but actual home, so more possible inaccuracies for which I expect you to call me out (all the experiences I have described are those of a tourist). Jehan and Montparnasse are also non-binary, I'm sorry if I've written anything ignorant or messed the pronouns, once again please tell me if I've done so!  
> Typos are mine and mine alone.  
> I'm going to continue this story, this is the first chapter. I'm actually working on the next part right now. Instead of studying for exams, that is.  
> Yes. The title is Shakira. I went through an existential crisis under a cherry tree in Regent's park with that song. I'm okay. _I'm fine._

So here’s a chart about why being drunk is cool, all scientific and shit:

a) If you’re Grantaire then getting drunk’s cool because you wax mythologic and give blond tiny ass leaders boners which makes them confused and then Courfeyrac  gets to laugh his majestic ass off at their face.

b) If you’re Pontmercy you cry on Courfeyrac’s lap over Lip Sync Battles, dance to Soviet anthems in the middle of the bar, serenade Cosette in Japanese and then Courfeyrac gets to laugh his monumental ass off at your face.

c) If you’re neither then you’re probably Courfeyrac and that means you’re awesome and that you have a crush on pretty much all of your friends. And that you’ve got friends such as Marius who’s drunk and _cute_ and bought all of your candy, and Feuilly who’s sober and _cute_ because he’s a cinnamon roll, too perfect for this world, too pure, and Bossuet who’s bald and _cute_ and totally wants to invite you to a foursome in which Musichetta and Joly consent, and Enjolras who’s blushing and moping and _cute_ and you want to write fanfiction about him and Grantaire getting a puppy together. Plus they all crush back on you and you’re going to have a huge orgy with chocolate fountains and glitter and Netflix later tonight. Right?

 _Wrong_.

If you’re Courfeyrac then it probably means that decisions are hard and life is hard and you’re horny and drunk and want to jump half the club but at the same time you want to form deep emotional bonds and be so in love that your intestines feel like that friggen 90s candy that fizzled on your tongue, and you want to get married and have twelve puppies and at the same time you want to paint your body lime green and dance to Mika for precisely eleven years and then cuddle with people and eat cereal from the box together, so many people, and explode with affection. Which makes you confused and your life is hard and Jean Prouvaire should write Shakesperean sonnets on it but at the same time zie should decide zie’s madly in love with you because zie makes bubblegums pop in your stomach and Combeferre should give you some medicine to treat your case but at the same time he should decide he wants to spend the rest of his life with you because he makes your heart swell like Cosette’s cupcakes.

So yeah.

“You’re staring too much, sugar,” Cosette coos sweetly in your ear and you kind of want to pinch her silly perfect observant face and then cry because you don’t know who she’s referring to because of _course_ you’re staring too much there’s just _too much to stare!!1!_ Damn, sister.

_Honey, too much love gonna rot your soul._

Which is lesbian mothers wisdom. Scientifically proven. You’re fucked.

                                                                                           *            

As fandoms switch by all year round, winter comes and it’s Jehan’s Harry Potter period, so naturally zie dyes zyr hair pink because zie’s Tonks. So naturally, zie’s wearing his giant marshmallow coat and you’re wearing Marius’ ridiculous skiing jacket, both wearing fluffy socks with flip flops and snuggies underneath because you’re wasted and have somehow ended up on top of a tree. Also there’s snow everywhere, and you’re drinking delicious hot strawberry chocolate goodness because life is beautiful, and you’re in love.

“When I grow up,” Jehan says in a deep, serious voice which shivers a little because it’s freezing your balls off out there, “I’m gonna get us a tree house, and we’ll start a pockets-on-all-the-clothes company with Cosette to get rich and live the life fae folk like us deserve.”

“Gee, don’t let Enjolras hear you say that.”

“Enjolras is too busy searching desperately what is this feeling.”

“LO-ATHING, UNADU-LTURATED LO-ATHING!”

“You sing so sweetly,” zie sighs dramatically, “I should write you a song.” Pause. A tiny flinch. Your shoulders brush together. Deaded. “Would you like me to write you a song?”

Because that’s Jean Prouvaire. Zie asks if you’d like the sun and stars, as if that’s even a question, and you’re both going to freeze the fuck down of the tree because you’re shivering and Joly’s gonna gut you but it’s okay because your ankles tangle together over a wet branch and you’re already dead. Life is overrated anyways. Adieu. You shall live eternally through Jean-sans-merci-Prouvaire’s sonnets right after zie consumes your soul, confiscates your chocolate and encases your poor, long-suffering heart in a VHS box because what kind of a fucking nerd would zie be otherwise.

“If it wasn’t so freezing,” zie says with chattering teeth, “we would smoke and make o’s and feel like cool flapper genderless people without the horrible social structures of the ‘20s.”

“That’s so poetic,” you shiver but only a little, because you’re obviously wasted. “Lovers come, lovers go,” you then sigh, feeling stalactites forming on your lips. It doesn’t make sense, there’s snow everywhere, it isn’t even fucking _spring._ The only pink thing here is Jehan’s hair, and zyr ridiculous coat.

You literally hear a _hoe don’t do it_ from what should be Feuilly’s general direction, only in your mother tongue.

“Quiero hacer contigo lo que la primavera hace con los cerezos,” you hit a low blow, and it’s too fucking late, God is crying at the cliché so Feuilly, bless his orange soul wherever he is, doesn’t even bother to invoke him. There’s smoke between your lips, only it’s probably the rotten cold _you’re both gonna get pneumonia_ kind of smoke, and then inevitably, you kiss.

You see stars every day, until constellations decide to fuck you.

*

You’re making love on the attic of your parents’ house because _of course you are,_ and you feel like you know all of each other before the sun has even set because it’s so easy to fill in each other’s book because your bodies fit and your minds fit and you can’t let this melt away like your body melts inside his. You’ve read him already and you want more and you know there’s more but you can’t consume it because it’s consuming you and you’re too afraid of losing nice things so you don’t let yourself have them.

You bury your face in his curls as you spill between his thighs. Your feet are thrusting against the wood that plants splinters in your heart like any other rose. It’s a tiny room, lit sick and fuzzy by the lamp behind the mannequin and you can feel his muscles untensing as your own tense inside his cage. And you pray, you pray with his name painted on your lips and sewn between your fingers and his name is every river on the map.

_courf courf courf courf courf oh courf_

You only do excess, but he’s got too much of it and it clashes with yours and you want to breathe, but he doesn’t even leave your dreams nowadays, and you’re scared of forgetting him but he laughs like a river and says it’s okay he’s the reoccurring kind and then you’re scared of never forgetting him because you won’t and he’s given you a lifetime and more and you need another heart to love him as much as you want to.

He can’t be there for you, not _just_ for you, because he’s Courfeyrac and daisies flow in his veins and his smile’s a rainbow and you’re but one single pathetic hue that’s limiting him and dyed on your hair, and he says he loves your roots but you can feel the antlers scratching his cheeks where they come to rest as he holds you. You never swallow your _I love you’s,_ you breathe them all over him, on his chest and his thighs and his jawline, you stick ‘em on your palms and you trail shapes on his waist for him to take home. You feel odd, as if you’ve been turned inside out, and you can’t imagine depriving him of sharing them in some other chain, he’s got too much light in him to stay in this dark lousy attic.

So you lie. Or maybe you don’t, who knows? Not this map. Not your feet. Not the daisies that died suffocated of love beneath them. You write on him with your fingertips and he kisses you hard before he goes and then you plead him to discover other bodies and teach you their geography because you can’t suffocate him and you can’t suffocate you and you need to stop yourself from drinking him _because you drink people and your book is full of lies because when it isn’t you don’t have a future and your pocket watch doesn’t. “It’s not you, it’s me” and the dark clouds pressing in the space between your ribs._

You feel him swallowing this _I love you_ from your lips and lumping on his throat. You’re choking him but you love him, and you mustn’t choke the daisies. 

*

The first real kiss you got from Courfeyrac, you stole from Jehan’s lips one sunlit April morning in Shakespeare and Co. You were sitting on the piano playing that song Courfeyrac says that makes you look like a giant fucking nerd.

The poet wrapped zyr arms around your chest, you regretted your stupid heartbeat that picked up beneath zyr palm, you felt the pen zie was holding between zyr fingers, pressing against your collarbone and you swallowed hard.

You craved the touches.

“You play beautifully,” zie crooned in your ear because Jehan, and then “it makes people come in their pants, you know,” because _Jehan._

That wasn’t an image your mind could bear, not because you were a prude or innocent, that might be convenient for people to believe but after getting high with Bahorel you knew your secrets are no longer safe. It’s just that you couldn’t let Jehan do this, you couldn’t let yourself think of zem that way, of the curve of zyr neck stretched back and zyr lips parted in silent songs the meaning of which you fail to grasp.

You turned around and found your head in the nest of his chest. Wasn’t that what friends did? His heart was thrumming distantly and you remember flinching at its frantic, irrational pace. Something made you think zie went around living his life like that, always feeling too much and thinking the others couldn’t hear. There has always been a special place in your heart for Jean Prouvaire, and you found it swelling and aching when you joined them in the typewriter room, where you could see the Notre Dame and the Seine through the window.

“What did you get?”  you whispered, gesturing at the books piling on his lap. Zie handed you over a couple of dusty tomes, clutching possessively on the rest that zie’d have to leave behind. You felt his pain. You had prepared your own pile, Irish Revolution, Simone de Beauvoir, Neuroscience and children’s Ghost Stories. It was lunch time and the room was mostly empty apart from a couple of tourists that wandered in and out, in and out, the way Jehan’s eyes swayed over the books and his hand came to rest over your own.

You talked because you always do, absent-mindedly and peering through the books. You exchanged a word or two about Courfeyrac, as if it wasn’t weird talking about your childhood friend with his assumed lover and a constant strangling feeling in your throat while you thought of kissing said lover for _zem,_ and then you were simply doing it without really remembering a beginning or an end. You tasted the cherries off of zyr lips, and you wondered if Courfeyrac tasted them or if you could taste Courfeyrac through zyr own. You remembered somewhere distinctly that Courfeyrac probably tasted of oranges and daisies (or the way you imagined daisies would taste if they weren’t flowers that people shouldn’t eat because gross), and then you pulled back and you saw a constellation, and it was the freckles planted on Jehan’s nose, blooming with expectation and it was enough, because you _shared_ zyr haiku by the window, and you couldn’t dream of holding back spring.

*

You’d always thought that love would come so easy for you, like on Sims. Joke, joke, joke, friendly hug, flirt, talk, talk, flirt, romantic hug, hearts popping all around your head like overly enthusiastic confetti, wooing done, next step Woo-Hoo, or maybe rewind and start with it in first place.

That was until you fell in love with your best friend, in a way you’d wished your lover would have let you fall in love with zem, and you were confused and you hated yourself, because you knew you’d never have him. Combeferre was your flatmate, Combeferre was your childhood friend, Combeferre was unreachable and _perfect_ and it hurt how you had to see him every morning, sleepy in the kitchen, making coffee for a groggy Enjolras, it hurt how you had to see him between piles of notes and books, laying like a cat on the floor or his head hanging like Spiderman’s from the armchair, his nose buried in some dusty book – and what if you reached upside down and kissed him – his eyebrows knitted in deep concentration and his ridiculous nerd glasses hanging dangerously on one side of his stupid cute face, and that was just too much. Any attempts of flirting were completely out of the question, since you had grown up mastering your skills together, and your poor little heart ached every day. Thus, it had started getting quite hard to keep on living a life depending on the sole ambition of avoiding Combeferre and his stupid glasses and his sidecut and his amazing hands and _ugh_ whenever he walked around the apartment shirtless with a towel on his head and a pencil between his lips after a shower, or when he baby-talked to his tarantula and invited you to go watch for spacecrafts together, and of constantly screaming on the inside while burying your face in pillows instead.

Maybe that was what your life was meant to be from now on. Buried in a pillow, screaming internally.

*

To be honest, you did most of it on purpose. You thought you had a plan, like you always do, but like most of the time, plans bear a certain proneness to error.

So yeah, when he first saw the tattoo sleeves he simply _had_ to clutch on Enjolras’ arm until Enjolras would actually realize it and start whining behind his essay and his glasses, and stay very still, making tiny Courf noises that made you want to join him for almost half an hour. But then again, Bahorel, Grantaire, Joly and Marius were just as fascinated and had a similar reaction. That night you went out with them and slept in different rooms, waking up on wrong beds besides people who liked tattoos. Yet he crawled his way into your mind and took over all your thoughts until you could hardly concentrate on anything anymore and you hated yourself about it. So eventually, decisive as you felt, you gave up. You picked him up from bars when it started to rain and heard him whine about all of his crushes in the car, trying hard to concentrate on the road so that you wouldn’t spend the entire ride taking him in, his face, his cheekbones, his sinister smirk and the dimples that appeared on his chubby cheeks when he filled the street with laughter and sunshine. You then spent whole nights trying to study while he’d ramble and sing along to musicals which you’d inevitably end up watching curled up with him. You remember his body before you gained permission to it, warm and always vibrating with some thing or another. You heard his endless rants and held him back from punching cops and burning flags and newspapers in the middle of the street.

It was okay, it really was. Until one day you realized how it is to feel your heart gasp, at that not-so-peaceful protest, when you saw him shouting with his fist up on one moment, and on the next one he was falling between the crowd. The "let me through, I'm a medical student" ridiculousness came out of you unrehearsed and it was horrifying. There was a bump on his head and your heart leapt on your throat. It wasn't that you remembered how he'd once told you he had a doctor kink at a shameless attempt of flirting, only after you felt his own steady on his wrist. He opened his eyes dazedly against the sun and smiled at you adorably. 

"Did I die and go to heaven?" He croaked.

"I hate you," you croaked back. You wanted to punch that stupid smirk off his face.

"You only say that because you want to kiss me." Damn, he was right. "Ow, that hurt."

"You're probably concussed. Serves you just right."

"You shoulda seen the other guy."

"The cop? Damn well I saw him. You're grounded."

"Says who?"

"Says me."

"I want to keep an eye on you tonight. You're sleeping in my room."

"Bruh, you could 'ave bought me a drink first."

*

You woke up in the middle of the night with your head on his chest. You realized you had been drooling all over his shirt, but couldn't focus on that before you'd find your glasses. You stretched an arm and searched blindly on the bedside table, until you realized they were half hanging on the side of your nose. 

Shadows were peering through the window and dancing on the ceiling, the gentle buzzing of the city lulling him to sleep. It was impeccably peaceful, his chest rising and falling slowly beneath your head, his lips half parted. Your breath caught on your mouth as he blinked his eyes open and smiled sleepily, tilting his head so that your breaths mingled.

"Hey," he hummed, and your insides danced.

"Hey yourself." You leaned in, wondering whether your lips would fit. Purely scientifically.

( _They fitted_.)

*

“Fuck me sideways.”

“With pleasure.”

It wasn’t like you didn’t fight. God, you fought _all the time._ When you’ve grown up together with somebody, and then you get in a relationship with them, there is of course this feeling of complete newness and exploration, but you also start off with the feeling of being already married. In the good sense. You know the other’s quirks already, like how Ferre always has to take the onion out of his burger and make disgusted faces even if he hears onion sounds between your teeth, how he turns the switch of the light three times every night before an exam and try to convince you there’s a scientific basis for his superstitions and how there are weird species of plants drying between the pages of his every book (which Jehan must not know about because, a Romantic he may be but he will still call him a vicious murderer and hide his crêpe mixture), and still there’s the excitement of discovering new, more intimate ( _dirtier_ ) ones, like the subtle way he flinches when your tongue goes over that spot on his belly, how he likes having his wrists held down, about that specific smirk that _kills you_ when voyeurism is involved and about the rehearsed professionalism he talks with when he’s topping, taking you apart with every hoarse whisper.

So yeah, the fighting comes without saying, especially when you both possess a certain amount of temper. It’s not like Enjolras and Grantaire who base their unresolved sexual tension of good ol’ married couple bickering. It’s just… you’re friends. You’ll never stop being such, and you feel like it’s the natural progress of things, yet natural can be defined in many ways. If the excitement of getting to know each other all more differently is natural and occurs when two best friends start doing the frickle frackle with feelings involved, then probably people should feel much more optimistic about things they thought they already knew.

You’d thought you’d been happy before, but it’s a different kind of happy to return home to the same hug that you’d always curled into, only now you’re able to let your hands wander under that sweater you love sniffling, to be able to kiss that sleepiness off his lips every lazy Sunday morning in a white kitchen. That’s a new liberty you could only dream of in the past, and you feel free. But freedom is a fucking strange concept, you should let Enjolras know. More often than not, freedom might be a pouty under the table snapchat that says “I’m horny, I’m ovulating,” to which he replies with a you-don’t-have-an-uterus-Courf-but-it’s-ok-you-still-my-fave sigh, just before getting up and clearing his throat all formally, straightening his sweater vest and addressing the rest of your friends.

“If you’ll excuse me, I have to go blow my boyfriend now.”

You’re so in love you want to fucking scream.

(Which you do. His name.)

*

Some things have to be swallowed down, and others simply must drown. Not the flowers, the flowers are floating and you consist of bathbomb water. Your fingertips are soaked and wrinkled, you're coming apart. It's okay. You reclaim the air they sucked out of you, your belly inflates and your body is floating, then you deflate and you're underwater, canons are blowing through the walls of the tub, that's how you died the first time, _it's okay_.

They're dragging you out of the water, over the glass surface and into the dazed white light of some lazy morning. “You keep sneaking into the fucking bathroom, Parnasse,” you say hoarsely at the hands that grab you, the transparent skin and the long bones that dig in your shoulders, small bruised nebulas on their knuckles (because you’re desperate to make poetic what is merely dizzy and sharp), you smell smoke and leather and interrupted baths and everything’s hazy because your mind is soaked. "Not so punk of you."

“You’re fucking Ophelia now?” they growl, and it vaguely passes through your minds that, after having known them for a while, they sound mostly like an overly aggressive kittem. You remember when you first met them, on the day they shoplifted the flower shop during your shift. They had looked truly terrifying, their leather boots smothering your chest, their cherry lips heavy on your throat before you even kissed, two nights later, stoned in some dark alley, where they’d given you a pair of earrings you could tell they hadn’t bought.

“No,” you cough out soap water. “I’m fucking you.”

You’re a walking cliché and a fucking cliché and a barely breathing cliché as you take them in your mouth and swallow him raw. You shut your eyes and you see what you want this to be. Ink and flowers and an old knife in the rattling yellow light on the kitchen tiles, smoke and leather and gasping for air when you come, gasping it all out until you’re purged and free of the rawness between your lips.

_Sorry_

_about the blood in your mouth. I wish it was mine._

_I couldn't get the boy to kill me, but I wore his jacket for the longest time_

*

You don’t remember when it starts feeling different, or if it was always different and you just were too enthusiastic to acknowledge that you ever felt this way. You’re receiving and giving back so much love, but you feel like your love is unlimited, and even though having a dozen of friends to adore is a great way to dispose it, you find yourself loving your memories and loving moments you can’t have again and hating yourself for it, because everyone and everything will assure you that you have everything.

You’ve been told before. You know that you’re greedy and selfish and you want it all, and you feel bad about it (or maybe you should), but at the same time you know that you _can_ have it all, Joly, Bossuet and Musichetta _have_ it all and you are young and it would be sad to let time pass with you not feeling whole, like a spring without cherry blossoms

Zie used to tell you zie loved you all the time, and you loved like you thought you never would again, but then zie cut you out. Zie said zie didn’t wanna limit you and you _hate_ the limits, _you hate them_

 _why,_ why can’t we have it all, why do you have to hurt people, how are you supposed to live with missing Jehan every fucking day

And Ferre is all you have, if you hurt him you’ll die, if you lose him you’ll die, because you’ve never loved like this before.

(or have you)

**Author's Note:**

> Almost everything is inspired by songs which I'm going to put into a playlist, mostly songs that have inspired me during my trip and made me all emotional (yep, even Mika and Shakira. Esp Mika and Shakira).  
> The poem that Courfeyrac oh so unpredictably quotes to Jehan is Poema XIV of Pablo Neruda because that's how pathetic I am.  
> The poem in the Montprouvaire scene is part of Richard Siken's Little Beast.


End file.
